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Pastimes : The Truth about Waco -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Bob Lao-Tse who wrote (152)	8/29/1999 10:31:00 PM
From: chalu2	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1449

I hope you would sleep better at night if I could convince you that no such terrible conspiracy is afoot, and that what you see are random acts of stupidity and incompetence. If you project purposefulness onto these acts, yes, it looks quite disturbing. I don't. Have you ever heard of the logical principle called "Occam's Razor."? This principle--which has been proved many times--instructs us never to seek a complex explanation for an event when that event can be equally as well explained with a simple one. Applying Occam's Razor leads us to conclude that most government actions that seem incredibly stupid and malicious can be attributed to common idiocy much more frequently than a calculated conspiracy. Now, I do not doubt that the federal government and the President seek more and more power. As for the government, this is the nature of bureaucracies. They want to run everything, not for evil purposes, but because they simply want to. That's right: it's as childish as that. You harken back to the simpler early days of the Republic. Things were far more decentralized then. You couldn't run Massachusetts well from the District of Columbia. It was many, many days by sweaty horse in the summer; and worse in the Winter. Massachusetts had to run itself; enforce its own laws; burn its own witches. As things got more complex, interstate transportation improved, and external threats got stronger, power tended to get more and more centralized in the federal government. Only the feds could pass national standards, raise a big enough army, regulate commerce among the states, etc. But this was not due to some evil plot. It's natural. Agrarian communities have gone through this forever. Bands of hunters and gatherers once roamed England under tribal chieftains. Then they elected nobles as things got more complicated. Eventually, they got to the point where they needed a King of the realm. The King consolidated more and more power until about the time of Henry VIII, after which things eventually shifted back somewhat to the people. The House of Commons was created, the King de-fanged, and now we are seeing the House of Lords even abolished. Sic transit gloria mundi . Now, particular Kings (Presidents) may be better or worse, and sometimes conspiracies do arise to accomplish certain goals. Our current society is too messy and open to right now allow such conspiracies to flourish. No, there is no grand conspiracy to kill people like Koresh. Who would be part of it? Clinton, Reno, Louis Freeh, the ATF, the FBI, special forces, who else? I think you do exaggerate for effect. Some people actually believe the government is out to kill them, and they go off and bomb federal buildings where more children are killed. Let's try not to encourage this.

To: Bob Lao-Tse who wrote (152)	8/30/1999 11:18:00 AM
From: Bob Lao-Tse	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1449

Just watched John Conyers on FoxNews trying desperately to spin the party line and save something of this. Lots of "Well... ummm....." Poor guy. I hope that the Clintons or the DNC or whoever it is that's paying him off for that, in whatever form they're paying him off, do so well. He just made an ass out of himself and didn't look very pleased with having to do so. Sort of reminded me of the Monica days, except that it seemed to be easier to defend the President's right to get a blow job in the Oval Office than it is to defend the use of a Geneva Convention banned incendiary device on innocent men, women and children. The basic spin was: Janet Reno was suddenly thrown in the middle of this and was helpless; The FBI is out of control; The "devices" were thrown at a concrete bunker, rather than the main wooden structure; And gee it's a shame. My rebuttal: If Janet Reno was helpless then she had no business being in charge; The FBI didn't create this situation, the ATF did and let's look at that some more, and if the FBI really is out of control, then again Janet Reno had no business being in charge; The "devices" contained CS gas which was banned by the Geneva Convention, making it illegal to use them even on enemies during war, much less on our fellow citizens, and the concrete structure they were nominally thrown at was directly connected to the main wooden structure and this concrete structure contained all of the women and children that were hiding in an attempt to survive; And gee, it sure is a shame. And a crime. And easily one of the sickest and most twisted illegal and unethical abuses of power in the history of the U.S. I'm usually mostly against capital punishment, but I don't think I'd mind seeing someone hang for this one.